Circular Nest by ShidyGames
A solo-made game, in 3 days, for the Ludum Dare 54.
Disclaimer:
All assets were made from scratch (but the Google font Righteous), as the project was meant to be a Compo entry but finally was released as a Jam one for polishing purposes.
Game also can be found on Itch!
The LD theme was Limited Space.
The game:
You're in control of a turret set in a circular arena. Strange bugs will eventually come and try to destroy your turret. Your mission: prevent that from happening.
It's a combination of Tower Defense, Roguelike, Shooter and maybe Vampire Survivors-like games. The more you progress, the harder it becomes. But the more bugs you'll defeat, the more upgrades you can pick.
And that's exactly where carefully selecting your next upgrade will be key! With every level-up, you'll get to choose between 3 randomly generated rewards to pick from. Make your own strategy to finish the game!
Also, the arena will shrink over time. And with that, the enemies will spawn way closer to the turret anytime this happens. This is where Limited Space takes place.
Oh and yes, all of the sound effects were made with my mouth and a microphone. And I think this is beautiful.
Controls:
- Mouse "cursor" to aim
- Mouse "left click" or keyboard Space bar to shoot
- Keyboard "R" to restart at any moment
- Keyboard "ESC" to quit the game at any moment
Did you like it???
Awesome! You can also find my first commercial project, ESCAPE SPACE, on Steam!
| Link | https://shidygames.itch.io/circular-nest |
| Link | https://shidygames.itch.io/circular-nest |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/circular-nest |
Ratings
| Overall | 259th | 3.875⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 77th | 4.108⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 739th | 3.153⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 480th | 3.757⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 557th | 3.635⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 80th | 4.086⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 107th | 3.941⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 600th | 3.485⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 27🗳️ | 54🗨️ |
Upgrades seem to be more important than skill. Makes it a bit random and frustrating in the beginning, until you know the right upgrade path (if you are not unlucky with enemy spawns in the beginning and don't get useful upgrades). That might sound bad, but I actually liked it after a while, and had quite some fun playing it.
Still, the best part are the sounds, for sure.
A little delay between the upgrade menu and the in-game scene would have been good because when it got frantic I always accidentally clicked random upgrades in-between shooting :sweat_smile:
The best part was the design (art and sounds)!
After playing a few times it felt that the difficulty ramped up pretty quickly, necessitating good upgrades as fast as possible. Would be more enjoyable if the difficulty curve was less steep, giving players more time to acquire more upgrades.
The variety of upgrades was pretty cool though, getting combinations like multishot + pierce and bounce made gameplay feel really good.
Congrats on achieving this solo!
It takes a couple of runs to understand which upgrade is the most important, which is cool :)
One nitpick: I sometimes clicked too quickly and the screen to choose the upgrade popped, closing immediately as my cursor chose something (but I was in the mindset of clicking on the enemies, not choosing the upgrade).
Maybe a button to validate when the upgrade is chosen would mitigate this?
Good job!
I really like the game mechanics / level design, it just plays super well and is satisfying! You struggle at the beginning, and then it's power fantasy.
I'm quite impressed with all the content and upgrade choice here, and I really like the idea of the smaller and smaller arena that changes your strategy over time.
Some upgrades are definitely way better than others, but it's kind of expected than a jam game with such a scope to not be perfectly balanced!
Great job ✨
Lots of options and neat idea of shrinking the arena space. The only issue I had was, that while spamming mouse click to fire I selected upgrades :smile: